3Q's 2018 Predictions: Decision Sciences

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As we head full-steam into 2018, our experts look ahead to the next 12 months and dish up some well-informed predictions on industry trends and shifts. Today’s predictions come from our Decision Sciences experts, Feliks Malts (VP of Decision Sciences) and Jack Palmer (Associate Director of Decision Sciences):

1. We’re going to see more MarTech consolidation/change in the space with the acquisitions we’ve seen happen over 2016/2017.

3. Google and Facebook’s attempts at creating their MTA (multi-touch attribution) solutions will force the existing independent MTA vendors to continue to do drive differentiation, bringing additional benefits to the customer.

4. We’ll see more convergence in both data synergy and focus on channel + audience + creative with targeting capabilities continuing to grow in sophistication and platforms like MTAs and DMPs creating more synergetic partnerships.

5. Growth in data access from various media and MarTech partners will continue to grow the need for solid BI/Automation/ETL solutions to make valuable and impactful use of the available data beyond “reporting”.

6. We’ll see more tracking blocking (following the lead of Safari) followed by more awareness of data privacy, and users wanting not to be tracked.

7. The continued rise of data aggregation tools like Segment will be hubs connecting data.

8. We’ll see the rise of voice-based advertising and the ability to track that as an additional channel.

9. Advertisers will see introduction and growth in the availability of more niche data sets into the data marketplace (purchase categories, products, more granular lifestyle attributes, etc.).

10. To our previous point, we’ll see more brands that have niche/valuable data starting to monetize this data in an anonymized but targetable way.

11. We’ll probably see a few more meaningless buzzwords created to sell blue sky ideas (machine learning, big data).

Photo credit: https://xkcd.com/1838/

We’ve asked digital marketing experts from across 3Q to share their predictions. Check out more here.

About the author

Kelly Whelan

Kelly joined the 3Q team in October of 2016. Originally from Mountain View, California, she graduated with a Marketing Management degree from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Since then, she has had the honor of supporting the marketing efforts of several great Silicon Valley-based companies, including AppDynamics, Granicus, UXPin, and 3Q Digital. She now resides in Austin, where she enjoys warm summers, great music, and breakfast tacos.